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Comment by siruncledrew | Hacker News Reader

That's what confuses me too. If they aren't making money any longer, they're basically saying "fuck you" to their own target customers?

What's the aim? ~~Bribing~~ Lobbying someone else in the government with the data they are gathering anyways in the hopes of cementing this?

So what this is telling me is if I don't like the way the government or public services is doing something, I should just plow ahead without any care and just force it and then be immune because I said so?

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Perhaps their real customer isn't the City of East Bumfuck, Minnesota, but the FBI or ICE or NSA. Though even in that case it seems a bit inept: they need some buyin from the locals to get their cameras installed in the next small town.

The Flock search system is supposedly limited so the city/police employee has to choose the permissions (eg. Which other jurisdictions will search results show up for).

If a city wants to exempt ICE, they can. However, if the city has a rogue officer who accesses the Flock search, they can forward the results to their ICE/DHS boyfriend (the claims of a recent firing and lawsuit).

Supposedly is pulling extreme weight. Can't remember the source but I remember reading a case where the city council thought there was one data agreement and Flock implementing broad sharing across all government agencies.

What’s this now? A corporation lied to its customer? There’s no way they will get away with it, right? It’s not like we have given corporations a blank check and won’t prosecute malfeasance… oh, wait, nevermind.

My "supposedly" is based on previous Flock events where reporting found out how many searches matched data in their city's jurisdiction. Flock's PR statement was that "this is what the city's account settings allowed, save for one jurisdiction which was configured in the wrong state".

It's quite possible that Flock has different sales contracts, so if a city manager (or whomever signs those contracts) doesn't have a lawyer review the contract or if neither the manager nor lawyer consider data sharing with the Feds to be a concern, then of course my assumptions are off.

But Flock's current PR cycle pins all of the blame for too much data sharing on the customer's permissions settings.

The data can still be sold to other municipalities. That’s kind of the problem here, handling this as anything other than a privacy violation, because anything else allows them to just lease private land to install them, then sell the data to whoever wants it. But the US has been anti privacy for a while now.

The local government isn't their only customer. They also have contracts with the federal government who wants piggyback access to as many cameras as they can.

I suspected that Flock cameras also notified repossesses, but a quick Google search suggests that police contracts don't, but that private property Flock installs (like shopping malls) do/can.

Maybe it's a shitty "you didn't actually cancel until you called us and sat through our upsell speeches for hours" kinda dark pattern.

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